This article proposes a comparative analysis of the changes in the employment standards in France and Germany since the late 1980s. The employment standards - which include the performance of the work, its remuneration, methods of assessing qualifications, and job security - are comprehended here as a discursive approach that relates, within the analysis of the public action, the struggle for hegemony between the discourses and the representations of the change in the identity of the actors, the changes in the power relations in the field of public policies, and the modalities of institutionalization of the same. In these countries, the changes in the employment standards that occurred at the turn of the century are the result of a common strategy of maximizing gross indicators of employment, whose conditions of possibility and consequences must be examined within the context of each national system of employment. The systems are based on the articulation of three dimensions (LALLEMENT, 1999): the relationship with the State and the public policies, the evolution of the power relations between interest groups, the forms of competition and the organizational structures in the relevant sectors. This theoretical approach, developed first, serves to characterize, in a comparative way, the employment systems and standards in France and Germany until the 1980s. The third part empirically summarizes a series of changes in employment that took place in both countries in the recent years, in varying degrees; and highlights some of its consequences in terms of - an uneven - redistribution of the overall volume of work, job insecurity and increased laborious poverty. The final section intends to explain the modalities of the previously discussed fragmentation of the employment standards, as related to the changes in the characteristics of the employment systems in these countries, from the perspective of the discursive change in this field.
Employment standards; Employment policies; Germany; France; Labor market reforms; Discourse; Lisbon Agenda